Creator Controlled Comics and the Shared Universe

Last week, Mark Waid wrote an “open letter” to creators on work-for-hire projects, detailing what he considers to be a decline in courtesy in parts of the industry over recent years. Given that he’s still working at Marvel, and Dynamite, this doesn’t mean that he’s done with work-for-hire forever (clearly), but it does highlight the tension over how freelancers might be treated in the modern climate. This open letter triggered response from all corners of the industry, with a number of creators disputing this picture of likely dangers and what seems to be the greater number supporting the author’s viewpoint.

On the surface, Mark’s article calls for little more than humane, ethical treatment for people who are contribute to the work-for-hire sphere. Acknowledgement that the companies hold the bargaining power, and that if you’re unwilling to declare that your dignity is an essential characteristic of your continued employment, you run the risk of losing it. There is, within the article, an understanding that a degree of interference is part of the process and that the price you pay for working in someone else’s world is that you must accept, and even benefit from, the ability to compromise. The letter’s essentially thesis is that artistic integrity is to be defended, additional labour remunerated and, where these are hard to find, the recommendation is to get out ahead by moving into the safer space of creator owned storytelling.

There is something precious about collective storytelling. When the stories we read resonate, we invest something of ourselves in the characters and situations. People finish a good story, and pay attention to the ‘If you liked this, you may also like…”. People find characters they like and want to see them interact together. People find stories they love and want to hear what happens next. This investment pays dividends when we return to those characters, worlds and genres we have invested in.

This is why popular culture moves in repeating patterns where storytellers and readers alike both affect and are affected by what they have read before. This is why we cannot get enough of Richard Belzer appearing in every show featuring cops, and a bunch that don’t. This is why, despite there being hundreds of unadapted crime fiction properties on the market, there are three separate Sherlock Holmes continuities in play right now. This is the source of the seemingly boundless energy that drives the growing plethora of entries on FanFiction.net. This is the secret to why the Lovecraftian mythos, Arthurian legends and Homeric epics remain so compelling and durable. Some sociologists suggest this phenomenon may be why religion has ascended into a dominant force in our lives, and some anthropologists suggest this process taps into the very way we have evolved to think.

Once a piece of fiction breaks past a certain level of popularity, its parts are inevitably strip-mined to become part of this storytelling leviathan. To our minds, however, there is something precious about those special instances of collective storytelling where the process is partially formalised.  There is something appealing about this process of integration taking place in the open, where the serial numbers are not filled off and instead a formal shared universe is created. These universes function as story-telling sandboxes, where popular characters are brought together in tales that at once are extensions, repetitions and commentaries on those that came before. That’s the fun of it. Anyone can write a story featuring public domain characters, but there is (to our minds) something rewarding in being part of a legacy, of knowing that a torch has, in a real way, been passed on to new hands, not just picked up by those wandering by.

This formalisation has reached its apogee in the spanning continuities of the superhero universes. Marvel and DC (and, more recently, Valiant, and Top Cow) each have generations of writers, including many of today’s great creative talents, working at once on a pair of interlocking narratives, part chorus and part cacophony, each contributing inspiration and beneficial restraints to the work of the other writers. This is, for many creators, the dream – to contribute to this great multi-generational shared work, to take part in crafting the stories of those characters and worlds they have loved their entire lives.

Despite this rarity and importance, despite the shared universes of their childhood being the professional dream of many talents, the last few years have seen something go markedly wrong in the world of work-for-hire comics. More and more top flight comics creators are indicating that they see the future in a world of creator-owned projects, where, like novels, the author’s voice is king, and the universe involved begins and ends at the borders of the book. Names synonymous with work-for-hire comics at their finest have sworn off the same, vowing never to return. Though many of them turned into comic book creators out of a love of shared universe stories, and though such worlds will always hold a special place in their heart, they can no longer deal with working in the work-for-hire side of the industry. In fact, most of the creators who have walked from/been fired from a project based on higher level executive decision making have spoken of it as a dream that has soured.

When some writers talk about why they’ve sought greener pastures, they often cite the old saw of “creative freedom”. But freedom from what? There is a certain line of argument that dictates that it is the sacred cow of well-beloved characters which circumscribe creative evolution, that the weight of the vast number of stories already told that precludes new stories, that the genre conventions of superhero comics are in some way tired or tiring. To a certain extent, that’s no doubt true – but we suspect it’s less true than it might be. For one thing, many of them immediately begin exploring ideas in that genre in creator-controlled superhero comics, often utilising ersatz versions of existing ideas and characters, letting them be taken in directions that the IP owners may not have allowed them to go. For another, one of the great reasons for the durability of the superhero genre is that they can borrow from any number of sources –science fiction, fantasy, espionage stories, crime dramas, thrillers, mythic epics, police procedurals – in short the kind of stories that creator-owned comics still often tell.

Perhaps it is simply the natural development of the industry, where changing business practices have created better commercial and creative opportunities for writers than were available to, say, Kirby or O’Neil in their writing prime (which is not to say that financial opportunities are any worse off – if anything, to the contrary). Given the grim spectacle of the treatment of many writers that is comics history, given the conditions that gave rise to legends like the screwing of Bill Finger, the impetus behind Image being forged from the frenetic commercial negotiations of the 90s, Watchmen still being in print in a manner to prevent the rights reverting to Moore and the crediting of Siegel and Shuster, it seems only logical to view the company and the creator, to an extent, in competition for recognition. The rise of writers like Gaiman or Morrison as powerful global brands seems to correlate to concerns from the employers about the increase in bargaining power. After all, once you are out there and established, you can get a vastly better deal – and rightly so. Nobody should begrudge a creator taking a healthy portion of something for which they are responsible. The refusal of the big companies to honour their constituent creators necessarily drives them to look at alternatives, and maybe what we’re seeing is a rise in the ease of communicating dissatisfaction and the many options open to creators that simply weren’t there up until the last few years.

But remuneration, notably, doesn’t seem to be the main driver. Time after time, the breaking point really doesn’t seem to be “I’m not paid enough” but rather a flashpoint argument between creators and editors over the direction of the story. The New 52 has given us ample examples of people walking not over what is, presumably, the same pay scale the signed up for in the first place, but the idea that their story will be chopped and changed on a whim. Mark refers to it in his open letter. John Rozum wrote about it. Greg Rucka wrote about it. JH Williams III wrote about it. Chris Roberson wrote about it. Rob Liefield shook his “easygoing” reputation on the internet with his rage over it. George Perez, Andy Diggle – the list goes on.

The sheer repetitiveness of this particular tale is, to those of us who are fans of property and writer alike, deeply depressing. For those of us who have grown up as adherents and defenders of the benefits of a thousand voices working in harmony, there is a dissonance between our desire for the free creative expression of our favoured talents and the need for a cogent and consistent baseline vision of how the shared space works.

We won’t lie, the latest DC debacle controversy involving the Batwoman creative team has spurred our hands in this regard a bit – but even as we, as readers, detest the ultimate effect it has on our reading (no slight against Marc Andreyko or Jeremy Haun, who we rate very highly as creators, but getting 80% of a story is deeply frustrating, not to mention our issues with the cancelling of a lesbian marriage we rated just a month ago as a watershed moment for feminism and LGBTQ rights in comics), we’re aware this a complex issue with no easy answer.

It’s the flashpoint of the debate about work-for-hire comics of our times. It isn’t as simple as ‘Company Villain, Artist Hero’ or its less popular Bizzaro comment ‘Company is a Business, Artist is a Whiner’. Regardless of the merits of any particular decision, DC clearly has both the right and the power to reserve the big decisions about the DCU unto itself and a strong vested interest in being seen to be using that power through editorial taking a tighter rein over its characters. No more associating writers and artists with particular characters, or vice versa. No more stints long enough for a definitive authorial voice to be established. Never mind that this has led to some of superhero comics most notable critical successes. From a commercial perspective, DC has no reason to want to give its bargaining power over to someone on payroll – it locks profitable IP down, puts issues at risks of delays, generally drives up writer costs without preventing sales attrition during the run and leaves the company with a major risk on their hands when the run finally ends. From DC’s perspective, surely it would be better if of the 100,000 people reading Batman, these 100,000 people are reliably there to read Batman, not Morrison or Snyder’s Batman. And so on, and so on.

Recently, we had the opportunity to ask Matt Fraction and Kelly Sue DeConnick at the Brisbane Writers Festival (some interviews from these guys will be coming shortly, once we censor the tapes with the REAL secrets on them) about how they see the future of superhero comics going – and Kelly articulated Matt’s theory (he was keen to establish it as RAMPANT SPECULATION, so note well) that eventually, editors will act more like television showrunners – that they will function as direction setters and creative voices, and artists and writers will come and go to keep the tone up. Television shows us that this method can function consistently and remarkably well, but it hasn’t caught fire (just yet) as a method of engaging with the audience in terms of comics. (Though, we, for example, generally trust that if Steven Wacker is editing a book, we’re going to like it – though there is no reason this should be guaranteed, the voice of experience demonstrates it is so). Though we think this is an intriguing idea that could have intriguing consequences on how shared universes operate, we question whether or not this will truly solve what we perceive as head office’s perception of the problem – that an individual, rather than the company’s IP, contains a significant portion of the value.

Where does that leave us? Writers want to do their best work, unencumbered by concerns of being cut-off mid-stream, of having sudden changes in direction mandated from on high, from being ordered declaratively that something is not keeping with an overall line direction. But at least some writers, and many consumers, want to see a shared universe of comics which cross over, which share characters and traits. Brian Michael Bendis has certainly reached out to certain high profile escapees from the noveau regime, but other than mass defection to the Distinguished Competition’s distinguished competition, what else could be done?

With that in mind, last week we started brainstorming an alternate model. What began as an off-hand comment – “What if we got all the writers DC has alienated in the past few years, and gave them their own comic book line?” – turned into a genuine thought experiment about how another version of the shared universe might look.

So we came up with our hypothetical new company (Creator Controlled Comics, or CCC). Let’s say we’re starting with ten writer and artist combos, who are each creating one title. So we have ten base titles in the CCU.

We started off, like all good geeks would, talking about who we could recruit, what sort of shared zeitgeist such a new universe would be built upon and what such a pool of writers might have pitched if they were true to form.

Because we only have limited time when we tool around in our lunch hours, we’ve focused on only on writers, and only on ten of the names who have been publicly isolated from DC in recent years, but that’s just so we don’t run out of space and time.

1. Mark Waid – Well-known telekinetic superhero Push, is also Juan Ortez, Secretary of Metahuman Affairs. Part West Wing, part high-kinetic adventure story.

2. Greg Rucka – The UN operates two separate yet equal branches for metahuman affairs: the UN International Crisis Operational Responders, or Unicorns, that who manage crises, and the Law Enforcement Investigating Officers, or Lions, who investigate metahuman crime. The Unicorns have a new Officer. Her name is Rita Pizarro. These are her cases.

3. John Rozum – The Yakamura Family have fled from their parallel Earth as it fell to the Armies of Nothing they accidentally unleashed! Now, they defend our reality against the besieging army from theirs!

4. W Haden Blackman/J.H. Williams III – In 1969, a rogue alien-thought virus conjured into being the hopes and dreams of a generation. She is Aquarius, ready to bring about peace, love and understanding by any means necessary.

5. Paul Cornell – The ten most powerful wizards in the world have invested their power into seventeen-year old Scarlett Sharpe! If only she could figure out why…

6. Andy Diggle – Brian Winter has generations of gun money behind him. He’s funnelled it into an identity as the Fog, a haunting figure of the Chicago underworld, a vigilante working both sides of the law!

7. James Robinson – Zijji Zorr is the greatest superhero in the world, active since 1925! Strange shapeshifting creature from the Invisible Moon of Saturn, zhe periodically reinvents zhemself as a new costumed identity, with the truth known only to a few trusted team-mates.

8. Chris Roberson – Shiela Helmsley is a Brooklyn medium. Sherlock Holmes is her familiar spirit. They solve the great crimes of the superhero universe, whilst trying to raise her eleven-year old son.

9. Ron Marz – The Pangalactic War destroyed Rilama, the Heart of the Interstellar Empire. A million refugees are circling the galaxy. The last vestiges of the Emperor’s Marshalls try to keep order in a chaotic universe, and the former backwater that was Earth is set to become a premiere trouble-spot.

10. Jim Zub – The Once and Future King, Arthur, Lord of the Pendragon, was supposed to arise and save the world. He died. His burden, and his powers, passed to the last Pendragon, Mordred of Camelot, who lives to atone for his past misdeeds.

This is just us goofing around with creators we’d like to see jam together, so we’re sure there are other creators who would fit right in with this stable. Rob Liefield could write a saga of mid-90s super-soldiers, betrayed by their government and in cryofreeze since the Gulf War, out for revenge after 20 years.  Josh Fialkov might spin a tale about the Spider-Kings of Europe and the heroic secret society that has checked them since the Industrial Revolution. In the world of rampant speculation, even Alan Moore might be lured out to take a staff job again (because when you’re pretending, why not pretend big?)

Also, please note, we can SEE this is a pretty testosterone rich list. It’s because we’ve only picked folks with very recent and public fall-outs. So, for example, if a writer had been let go, and then the decision quickly reversed, that name would be omitted, even if we think she… the hypothetical she, that is… is the bees knees. By the same token, there’s a bunch of fantastic female creators – KSD, Marjorie Liu, Nicola Scott, Amy Reeder, Jill Thompson – who have shown no sign of corporate dissatisfaction with their current arrangements whom we’d nevertheless consider any hypothetical company to be lucky to have.

Once you have the talent, and you know what they want to write, how do you manage the ongoing challenge of editorial control vs. autonomy, of managing the value of the shared universe without stomping on the creators that have turned up to have their voices heard?

That was the first challenge. After all, nothing is gained if the new boss is the same as the old boss. Our idea, then, is to change the very definition of boss. The IP remains owned by CCC. However, every creator is entitled to a creator’s credit and a moral right of authorship, but to make it perfectly clear; the company itself owns the characters. The twist, however, is in how the funds are allocated – profit sharing. (Insert your own joke about communism in the arts here.)

Comics themselves don’t have a particularly high cost end, compared to their sales price. We’d propose taking a page from the Monkeybrain book, and releasing the comics in question as digital comics only, with printed trades to follow. Let’s say we take out 15% of the company’s total monthly takings for production costs and advertising. That leaves us with 85% remaining.

60% of those profits are shared equally between each book, and then divided amongst the creative team thereof. The individual books don’t have editors – there is a line editor and a line deputy editor, who draw a salary from 5% of the profits for proofing, dealing with story ideas, managing communication, etc, etc.

The remaining 20% of the profits are divided as proportional bonuses for how well the individual creators books sell compared to the other books.  If one book sells 100,000 copies (you go, hypothetical comic!) and the others each sell 20,000 copies, then of the extra funds 7% is allocated to that first creative team as a bonus, with 1.44% being awarded as a bonus to the other creative teams.

Additionally, there will be a couple of spine books shared between the writing teams. After all, there is little point going to all this effort to create  a shared universe if it cannot leverage those advantages we spoke about earlier – seeing the characters interact, seeing how their stories are affected by the wider world and genre.

So let us say there are two team books. The first is your basic and mandatory Big Team book, the Justice League/Avengers equivalent, where each writer and artist takes a turn for an arc before passing it along to the next creative team. Here is where you see Aquarius, Jack Yakamura, Push and the Fog kick around together battling alien invasions and dealing with any torrid soapy romances that may spark. Writers and artists can create to their strengths (so you can do a small scale Champions at Thanksgiving story, or a world-ending apocalypse story, but they both take place in the Champions book).

Because, as shared universes go, anything starting in 2013 is behind the 8-ball, the other title will be a world-building book. In effect, it’ll be a team-up book that doesn’t have the pressure to tell stories about what the big heroes are doing now. Instead, the stories can be crossovers between any two or more characters, major or minor, spread throughout the history of the setting and slowly building a history for the setting.

The writers-of-the-moment of these respective books would be of course be paid for their issues of these books, but there would be no profit sharing on them. They would instead be an investment, building interest in the line as a whole and increasing the value of the wider CCU.

Outside these two lines, the very principles on which this enterprise were founded demand that management would have to be by consensus. Crossovers can be decided upon between creators, but there is no editorial overseer that can dictate an event involving the Fog and the Mordred. The writer of any individual title has final arbitration over what is happening with everything created in that line (the protagonist, obviously, but also their sidekicks, villains and set-pieces) but a consensus view in encouraged, and pitches are made based on the collaborative spirit. While nobody uses vampire Professor Moriarty without Roberson’s say-so, the spirit of the endeavour is share your toys.

(Also, everyone gets a pony…because this is a thought experiment, and thus owes as much fidelity to our capacity as anything that comes from the magical wish-granting engine).

We’re aware this sounds like an idealised and simplistic solution to the natural friction created by diverse opinions. Because ownership of the characters remains with the company, if you change lines, you change your sphere of influence. As with the Marvel writer’s retreat, internal consistency and good will is to be maintained through conferences, but rather than irregularly, everyone is gathered around a digital/Skype-esque meeting room once a fortnight to shop through the latest upcoming issues at least one “team” book, There’s no royalties or ongoing fees payable to you when you cease working for the company – but whilst you work there, some portion of 65% of the total pie is allocated to you. That means, the better the company does, the better the creators do – and this slice of the pie remains regardless of what title you write. Get bored with a title? Swap with someone else, or create a new character to fit in with the universe and you’ll keep getting paid. The only role the weak executive branch of this publishing house has is to greenlight new projects with potential and pull the plug on if and when sales have fallen sufficiently low enough to see a title being cancelled. Being on a best-seller is a winner for the creators, but it also doesn’t mean that you don’t draw a decent salary (provided the company is doing well enough overall), if you’re not writing a best-seller.

This also means that you can’t get cheated out of your bonuses as a creator – if TPBs or figurines or posters are selling particularly well, a proportion of the profit of those products still goes to you. This incentivises creators to keep writing for the company, and doesn’t mean that the company reaps the benefit of locking creators into a crappy deal early on. More titles could be added as the universe grows, but although that would change the percentage of profit allocation, it is to be hoped that those new comics would sell well enough as to increase the overall size of the total being divided as to keep the money rolling in for everybody involved.

This also allows a universe to grow and change without abandoning any of its concepts – when writers stop writing them, lines will dry up if no-one replaces the writer, but the characters will still exist in the universe. Does it offer work-for-hire creator the full benefits of the creator owned comic market? No, but it does offer the big incentive of the work-for-hire arrangement – a staff salary, with more creative freedom and the opposite of editorial meddling. Nothing about this structure prevents a creator from doing their own stuff and coming back and forth from the well as they desire, and it ensures that the company never gets bigger on the back of a particular creator’s work without sharing some of that glory around.

Maybe we’ve missed a fundamental step – in fact, we’re pretty certain that we have – but this isn’t a business plan or a prospectus, it’s a thought experiment. The goal here is to workshop why this would/could/wouldn’t/couldn’t work and thereby come to a greater understanding of the models that exist today. We encourage you, if you’re keen on this kind of navel gazing, to chime in, even contradict, in the comments. But can you imagine it if say, Karen Berger ran this enterprise?

We’re tooling around here, of course, and we’re operating from personal taste. Everyone listed above has their own projects in the pipeline, and seem happy with what’s in front of them (and rightly so). Many of them are producing some of the best work of their careers. There are vast options in front of them, and in front of readers. We’re not saying we could do anything better than they have done it, or than the companies (both those that employ them, and those with which they have disputes) could have done.

We did, however, realise that we are about as dedicated as non-industry readers and critics can be, and we so rarely hear conversations about other ways the industry can operate. Mark’s open letter, which we mentioned right at the start, ranks alongside Thrillbent as one of the big conversations about the model (along with, as we mentioned briefly above, the highly open-to-the-public processes over at Monkeybrain, who are always happy to talk about how they keep their house in order with us). Maybe its time that, as a culture of consumers, we stopped talking about who is in the next crossover (well, not stop, because some crossovers are cool) and started thinking about what we want the next companies to look like.